Welcome to the Captain's Blog. These are my highlights of being principal of MAST Academy, Miami-Dade County Public School's Maritime and Science Technology High School. I welcome any questions or feedback from parents, students, and visitors. Please post your comments and questions using the comments link at the bottom of each post. I look forward hearing from and beginning conversations with the entire MAST family, past, present, and future.

MAST Mission Statement

MAST Academy provides a marine setting and a nurturing environment for studies leading to academic success, career preparation, an appreciation of the sea, and environmental awareness. Stakeholders work together to instill a commitment to life-long learning and to advance and improve a challenging curriculum integrated with sciences and technology.

MAST Academy Pages

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Today we had a great day of planning and getting ready to begin the MAST Summer Anchor Program. The whole staff participated and created their own individual weblog through Blogger.com. We each also created a Bloglines account to "catch" the students' postings. Tomorrow one of the first activities we will do is work with each of the students as they follow the same process to create blogs for themselves. The purpose of the student blogs is to collect artifacts of and record reflections on their learning throughout the summer. It is the first step in the development of our MAST ePortfolio, wherein students collect samples of and document their growth and learning over the course of their career at MAST.

MAST ePublications via Yudu

Captain's Book Shelf

Interesting Quotes

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done-then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.

- F. H. Burnett, 1911, The Secret Garden.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly becuse we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly.

- Aristotle

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.